In
Memoriam Domenico Losurdo
By
Grover Furr
July
1, 2018
I
first learned about Professor Domenico Losurdo, who died on June 28, because of
his 2008 book Stalin: storia e critica di
una leggenda nera (Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend) and the storm
of protests against it published in 2009 in the pages of Liberazione, the newspaper of the Partito della Rifondazione
Comunista.[1]
I
read the attacks on Losurdo’s defense of Stalin with interest. My book on
Nikita Khrushchev’s lies in his “Secret Speech” to the XX Party Congress of
February 25, 1956, had just been published in Russian, in Moscow, in December
2008, as Antistalinskaia podlost’
(Moscow: Algoritm). The discovery that Khrushchev had evidently not been able
to identify a single genuine “crime” of Stalin’s had led me to wonder whether
there really were any such crimes.
So
I obtained Losurdo’s book on Stalin, scanned it to PDF (I still have this
copy), and studied it. I found Losurdo’s firm defense of Stalin, particularly
on the basis of the Soviet Union’s and the Comintern’s fight against
imperialism, to be a breath of fresh air, a sign that there were others who
questioned the demonization of Stalin and the consequent rejection of the
communist movement of the 20th century.
In
2012 Losurdo engaged French anticommunist scholar Nicolas Werth in a debate
over Stalin.[2]
I noticed something that Losurdo could not: that Werth was citing recent
publications about collectivization of agriculture and the Soviet famine of
1932-33 in a dishonest manner. I wrote about this to Losurdo, who thanked me
and put my remarks on his blog.[3]
In
2014 I was on a panel at the Left Forum in Manhattan, New York City. At the end
of the panel a gentleman approached and introduced himself to me as Domenico
Losurdo. Delighted, I introduced him to the still-full room as the renowned
communist philosopher. In town to present a new book of his own, Losurdo had
come to hear my talk!
An
updated English version of my book on Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, Khrushchev Lied, had been published in
2011. Losurdo offered to introduce me to an Italian publisher, Città del Sole,
and to write an introduction to the Italian translation. With his permission,
Losurdo’s introduction appears in the Italian, German, and French editions. Losurdo
graciously agreed to write a back-cover comment for my book The Murder of Sergei Kirov (2013) and a longer
introduction to that book which remains unpublished.
Losurdo,
as he himself always insisted, was a philosopher, not a historian. He did not
read Russian. And in any case he would not have delved into the primary sources
from the former Soviet archives that now permit us to see how fraudulent the
anticommunist scholarship about Stalin, capitalist as well as Trotskyist, has
always been and still is today.
But
Losurdo was a deeply historical philosopher. Marxist philosophy is called
dialectical and historical
materialism. Losurdo’s deep knowledge of the history of the twentieth century,
and particularly of the real horrors of imperialism on the part of the Western
“democracies,” detailed and defended the role of the Stalin-era Soviet Union
and the Communist International in combatting imperialism.
Losurdo
surmised, as have many others, that the contradiction between the liberatory
struggles led by the communist movement and endorsed by Stalin, and the
purported “crimes” of Stalin, was too great. Something about this story did not
make sense! He was right.
The
purpose of philosophy, as Karl Marx wrote, was to change the world. We can add
that the purpose of honest, materialist history is to learn the lessons,
positive and negative, from the past, so we can contribute to those forces that
are building a better, brighter world for future generations.
Above
everything else Domenico Losurdo was a fighter for the truth. His contribution
to the eventual liberation of the oppressed and exploited remains with us and
with the generations of fighters that will come after us.
[1] The debate
over Losurdo’s book can be found at the Internet Archive, at https://web.archive.org/web/20100116001009/http://letteresustalin.liberazione.it/
Liberazione
stopped publication in 2014 and its web site is no longer on line.
[2] Werth’s
contribution is here: http://www.lafauteadiderot.net/Staline-et-le-stalinisme-dans-l,854
; Losurdo’s response is here: http://www.lafauteadiderot.net/Staline-et-le-stalinisme-dans-l,855
FOR DOMENICO LOSURDO WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2018/06/domenico-losurdo-italian-marxist-and.html
https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2018/06/interview-with-domenico-losurdo-marx.html
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2018/06/presentazione-di-stalin-storia-e.html
https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2018/06/domenico-losurdo-nazism-and-racism-and.html
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